Studies of Relational (Declarative) Memory Processing

University Of Illinois At Urbana-Champaign, Urbana IL

Investigators

Abstract

This research will explore the mechanisms of memory supporting the ability of people to remember the details of their experiences. Previous research has indicated that there are different memory systems in the brain that support different types or forms of memory. Considerable recent research has been directed at attempting to characterize these systems. One form of memory that has been identified, "declarative" or "relational" memory, is associated with the operation of a particular brain system, the hippocampal system. This system is thought to be critical for remembering one's experiences by enabling memory for the relations among the elements of the events, situations, or scenes encountered in daily life (or in the laboratory). This form of memory maintains information about what people and/or what objects were part of a given experience, in what context they were encountered, where they were located with respect to the scene and to each other, who did what to whom in that experience, and so forth. This research will take advantage of a new research approach and a set of converging methods to examine the specialization of different memory systems for different aspects of memory processing, operating simultaneously. In doing so, it will provide a test of the idea that the hippocampal system is specialized to support relational memory processing, and it will provide a more detailed characterization of the nature of this relational form of memory. The research will use an eye-movement-based methodology to assess memory for items and memory for relations among items, both in normal control subjects and in amnesic patients with profound memory deficits following hippocampal system damage. The research methodology will allow this assessment to take place separately and simultaneously. It is expected that amnesic patients will be selectively impaired on measures of memory for relations among items, across a range of different types of relations, while simultaneously being intact on measures of memory for (repetition of) individual items. Additional studies will assess brain activation during memory performance of normal human subjects using functional neuroimaging methods. It is expected that activity of the hippocampal system will be associated selectively with measures of memory for relations among items, again across a range of different types of relations, while activity of other brain systems will be associated with measures of memory for (repetition of) individual items. Taken together, such results will provide critical information about the nature of relational memory, its dependence on the hippocampal system, and its impairment in amnesia. By furthering understanding of how we form and maintain memory for relations among items, this work will provide insight into that form of memory most critical for the ability to remember our experiences and to learn relational information. Such insight holds enormous promise for guiding the teaching of any domain of knowledge involving fundamentally relational material, from structural relations to the relations among high-level concepts.